You wouldn't happen to have a blob of pseudocode lying about the place that you could paste in to give a flavour of how you write it? Perhaps with a corresponding finished snippet? I sort of have an idea of what pseudocode is, but I'd be grateful for pointers about how much detail others find it useful to go into, etc.

I personally don't write pseudocode, primarily because the type of projects I work right now on tend to not need it. However, according to

Code Complete

, pseudocode should adequately describe the functioning of the routine in detail enough to implement it in any language, yet not go into so much detail that it's obvious what language it was designed for.

For example, you wouldn't say "Increment $i by 1.", because you've limited what languages you can write this pseudo-code in. Instead, you'd say "Increment the Bank Record Number by 1.". Or, even better, you would say "Go to the next Bank Record."

Say you were taking money out of a ATM. (This is a common example in the books.) It might look something like:

Put your card into the ATM
Input your PIN# when requested
Input desired amount of money
Wait for money to arrive
Take money and card and receipt

When putting a smiley right before a closing parenthesis, do you:

Use two parentheses: (Like this: :) )
Use one parenthesis: (Like this: :)
Reverse direction of the smiley: (Like this: (: )
Use angle/square brackets instead of parentheses
Use C-style commenting to set the smiley off from the closing parenthesis
Make the smiley a dunce: (:>
I disapprove of emoticons
Other